THESIS - CHAPTER ONE - ENVIRONMENT and EDUCATION

“If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed”

– Carl Sagan, responsible for the worst and greatest family photo in history (Sagan, 2006, p. 221).

“We’re beings-toward-death: we’re featherless, two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms”

– Cornell West, a blues-loving Southern Baptist (Taylor, 2008).

Formative Experience

I was born in Vancouver and raised in a house in a neighbouring suburb that backed onto a small forest where I spent much of my free time. With a preference for time alone in the woods with my imagination, somehow my parents made the perfect choice in naming me after A. A. Milne’s protagonist, Christopher Robin. This setting, along with Stanley Park, the Vancouver Aquarium, and its surrounding forests and intertidal zone, all hugged by snowy mountains and foggy sea, feel very much like home and feature strongly in my memories of childhood. And, whether overturning slimy rocks on the shore, crumbly logs in the woods, or peering into a tidepool or drop of pond scum, I was aware from early on of being immersed in a teeming world composed of and overflowing with little worlds –all of which seemed to contain within themselves still more hidden worlds. My childhood diet of books[1] and of television and film[2] seemed only to confirm that I lived in a world of wonderous places brim-full with conversant creatures all swimming in a panoply of ineffable mysteries. The science and nature programming of the CBC and BBC, along with the stacks of National Geographics piled in our basement, only further enculturated me to these ideas. Moreover, all the local heroes, people like Emily Carr, Bill Reid, and David Suzuki, seemed to form a similar cast characters to those I was nourished on in the fiction and non-fiction I consumed; and, critically, all of whom in their own way connected with, celebrated, and worked to educate others about this place. Additional perspective and sense of place came from our annual family vacations. Both of my parents being teachers meant that the whole family, the five of us, all had summers off. We would pack a tent trailer and drive it around to see as many of the cities, villages, and provincial, state, and national parks of this continent as we could in the six weeks we had. A solid decade of this meant we experienced quite a lot of the contrast and beauty this part of the world has to offer.[3]

Formal Education

Reflecting the local diversity, those collisions of countless worlds macro and micro, the elementary and high schools I attended brought together students and staff from radically different circumstances – almost maximally so it seems, given what I’ve observed in other parts of the province, the country, and the world. Looking back, that diversity is what I treasure most; though at the time it nearly went unnoticed because, of course, it was all I knew.

On the academic front, from kindergarten through grade twelve, the experience was largely one of disorientation and discomfort. Doubtless these feelings contributed to my under-performance and report cards full of C and C- accompanied by commentary noting my lack of engagement. It seemed combinations of still and silent reading accompanied by hours of clerical work was not an ideal fit for me. Eventually, a high school leadership program helped make school meaningful and bearable by connecting me to other places and students of other age groups through regular off-campus projects and community engagement. At age sixteen, I began volunteering at an inner-city elementary school and near-by community centre supporting (and being supported by) kids in their seasonal, out-of-school day-camps. These were engaged, community-oriented projects that situated socialization and learning in the world and with others, often by way of food and play. All of this made a lot of sense and caused me to seriously reflect on my own education for the first time. Despite a growing suspicion and reluctance toward school I did somehow manage to graduate on time. And that’s when life began to happen.

The School of Life

Within months of my graduating high school my mother died. One day she felt unwell enough to stay home from work and by that night she knew something was not right and we were driving her to the hospital where, in just a matter of hours, she had died due to “complications from the flu.” Aside from being my mother and the first person I knew to have died, she was by far my strongest connection and ally and the person I most related to. She was, like many mothers, also the star around whom our family orbited. And, just like the sun blinking out without warning, I found myself not merely in the dark but also having many of my assumptions and expectations about life and what the world is like abruptly overturned.[4] At eighteen, love and death were things I’m certain I would have insisted I had some comprehension of, or at the very least was prepared for in some small way, surely; yet the psychological and physiological impact of contending with the real thing strongly suggested the absence of any such preparation.

After the experience with my mother I’d pledged never to go to a hospital again. And, as life is wont to do, such a vigorous assertion was almost immediately tested. Just weeks after my mother’s funeral and while reorienting to this strange new life, I found myself again piling into the car with my family and driving to the hospital. This time it was my father, whom my sister discovered early that morning suffering all the symptoms of a stroke. I remember little from this time and, occurring in the ‘90s and prior to ubiquitous digitization, I have almost no record of it.[5] As a result, I can’t say much other than to note that I felt at the time like I was a well-functioning human who understood these two experiences, was dealing with the repercussions and, by way of my thoughtful and gallant stoicism, remained effectively unchanged. In hindsight, it was a real education in just how ignorant one can be of their own experience.

My father recovered after a month or so in hospital; or, rather, his likeness recovered: half of his prefrontal cortex was no-longer operative and he sported a new personality. In recovery, during a year of what I called, “brain damage class,” he met the woman who would eventually become my stepmother. It was a wild and previously unfathomable year. Naturally, and though I was already of the mindset, the experience impressed upon me further the triviality of so much of what preoccupies us and the value of those things which are so easily taken for granted. I also came away with a related sense that what had previously felt so firm and immutable was almost impossibly diaphanous and fleeting. What I understood to be as near to bedrock as possible (such as one’s personality and memory, that natured and nurtured ‘who’ or ‘I’ we consider ourselves to be) appeared more like a dancing mist than a granite slab with evermore pronounced and elaborate etchings.

Later that year, I had the opportunity to move to a new city with my girlfriend and our mutual friend. The change of scenery was irresistible. After settling into this new setting, I eventually found work in a kitchen.[6] Though the hours, conditions, and wages were as poor as possible while still being (mostly) legal, the work gave me an excellent crash course in labour and class issues, aside from those I acquired through osmosis from my intake of folk music and by belonging to a long line of teachers, electricians, and other union members. This circumstance meant I was able and motivated to take full advantage of the self-induced, industry-wide, high staff turnover rates. Feeling no loyalty and knowing I could return to my job or get a new one at any number of other restaurants, I was empowered to live frugally and leave my job whenever possible, often for months at a time to discover alien corners of the big, big world. My then-partner was studying anthropology and these adventures typically coordinated with her desire to visit places and peoples she’d been learning about, to have some language immersion, and eventually do field work. We bounced through Asia and Southeast Asia regularly and eventually moved to Australia where she attended grad school and I found jobs in more kitchens, all while making extended return trips to remote parts of the Indonesian archipelago. I was fascinated with all of these places and persons (human and otherwise) and they too seemed fascinated with me. From bacterial infections that stumped Western medicine to several unpleasant run-ins with people who, in the aftermath of September 11th and the resultant invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, couldn’t possibly resist making their feelings about geopolitics known to such an uncommon bird as this “American terrorist.” Though incidents like these didn’t feel like such at the time, in hindsight they seemed nearly inevitable consequences of travelling in rural areas less heavily traversed by foreigners. Of course, all these experiences were good life lessons and became fun stories to tell, too.

Throughout all these adventures, the plan was always that when my partner was done with school, we would change roles: she would work while I went back to school, though I was never certain what that would look like. However, our relationship wouldn’t last and, as is often the case with change, that eye-opening gave me new focus. Now with some life experience as well as some positive, if vicarious, exposure to school, I knew what I wanted to do and was inspired to give post-secondary a try.

Re-education

After a decade away from school and from Vancouver, I returned to both and started college as a twenty-eight-year-old with the goal of becoming a teacher. Though I had a terrible time in school academically, I was always hungry both for learning and sharing what I’d learned as well.[7] Previously, I disregarded education as a career path at least as much because I had a bad time there myself as it seemed everyone I knew was a teacher. I also considered education the family business since not only were my parents teachers but my sister became one as well. However, along with some wonderful times in day-camps, I was stirred by voices of education reformers such as Ken Robinson, Alfie Kohn, and David Solway. It was nearly an out-of-body experience to hear Sir Ken echoing, and to wild applause, the kinds of things my friends and I said as teenagers:

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. (Robinson, 2006)

I felt myself to be one of those people Robinson so well described in his now-fabled talks: someone who was not merely educated out of their creativity, as many seem to be, but also not personally served by a pedagogy so rigidly and narrowly time-oriented and focussed on so few skills in fiercely isolated subjects. In this way, I imagined myself a perfect recruit for the (r)evolution being called for in the world of education. But to start I first had to touch up on all the skills for school I failed to pick up as a child.

With this plan and slowly acquiring some school-tools, after several semesters of introductory courses, I was doing well and having fun. Among many learnings, I found that I needed to throw out everything I knew about studying and learning, ignore what others did (like notetaking and memorization) and instead do what worked for me (listening intently and processing what I was learning.) A real boon was that by aiming for Elementary Education I needed to take a full spectrum of subjects. This diversity suited me well as I had little interest in being stuck in all history or math courses for years on end and wanted to be taking all the advantage I possibly could of as many different programs and instructors as were available. On the side, I helped incorporate and volunteer for a non-profit program teaching kids about urban sustainability, food, and nutrition. I also found a spectrum of employment at this time: from day-camps and local festivals to web development and graphic design, and I went tree planting in Northern B.C., too.[8]

After earning an associate degree at college, I went on to pursue a four-year degree. To start, I was accepted into an experiment called the Undergraduate Semester in Dialogue. It was an unconventional program initiated by a divergent-thinking, community-oriented bee biologist employing a transdisciplinary and experiential approach while, naturally, accepting students from all disciplines. When I participated, the semester was about exploring all aspects of the local food system to help inform an urban sustainability project. Rather than focusing on reading theory or studying journal articles, we travelled all over the region and spoke with city councilors, organic farmers, grocery wholesalers, and community activists while working on related personal, group, and whole-class projects. It was an amazing introduction to university and a real example of what school could be. From there, I took up a degree in the highly interdisciplinary School of Communication where I took courses ranging from acoustics and linguistics, to advertising and propaganda, cultural policy and more.[9] After completing my undergraduate degree, I then applied to another school for Education – neither of which seemed likely, never mind certain, just six years earlier.

From the start of my post-secondary experience to taking up a degree in Education, a lot was going on besides school and work, but mostly more death. In fact, there was a time in which it felt like all I was doing was attending funerals. My four grandparents and my step-mother’s step-mother, who’d become family, all died of cancer or old age; my step-brother, who outlived and outperformed people’s wildest and narrowest expectations for someone with cerebral palsy, eventually ran up against the limits of technology and science; and, too, my step-mother (who had, to everyone’s rejoice, very much “survived cancer” through rational joint application of the miraculous healing arts of chemo, surgery, nutrition, meditation, prayer, crystals, and walks on the beach) eventually transitioned from her status as cancer survivor. In addition, though still alive, in the course of his ongoing stroke-related blood tests my father was himself diagnosed with a chronic cancer. If there was an upside to all of this loss, it was that my father and I became much closer as a result. Prior, he and I shared little in common and spent the better part of thirty years failing to understand or even hear one another, all of which caused considerable friction between us, so there was a real chasm to cross and “closer” was not hard at all.

A Schooling in Education

Accepted into Teacher Education, I found there a program reimagined only a year earlier. The whole school, department, and all our classes were infused with the language of education reform. Everyone continually cited renowned change-makers and encouraged the kind of mould-breaking demanded by the impending (r)evolution. The weeks and months that followed, however, confirmed the growing suspicion among many of us would-be teachers that the program and those school districts we’d become embedded in were not slow or reluctant but instead hostile to change. Even the theory and best-practices we were forced to learn during our studies were rejected out in the wild. We read paper after paper, and wrote paper after paper ourselves, about diverse learners, multiple literacies, multi-modal learning, alternative assessment methods, and experiential education – all reciting how crucial it is to uncover prior knowledge, provide scaffolding, exploit the eclectic capacities of students, and engage with the living world if we want to see real learning occur. And we did all this, of course, while spending entire semesters confined to rows of desks, under the electric buzz of incandescent lights and the death-rattle of air conditioning vents, within the suffocating white walls of this institution. Those of us not on Facebook spent season after season staring out the window, watching eagles circling above the towering cedar, hemlock, and fir of the peak temperate rainforest just beyond as we were lectured to about the power of outdoor education and place-based learning. To me, the whole experience was mind-blowing. In fact, it felt so outlandish that some of us speculated, or hoped, that it was all an elaborate ruse to see who was paying attention and would have the integrity, humanity, or instinct for self-preservation to balk.

My cohort and I followed these courses with time in elementary classrooms on our formal practicum. There, I was horrified to discover that little if anything had changed in the school setting since I’d attended decades earlier. Within the region’s “most tech savvy district,” I found kids receiving less exposure to and guidance around computers than I did at the same age in a similar neighbourhood back in the 1980s. Here too, our school had no projector, television, or any other digital tools for us practicum teachers to use, tools we all wanted and considered more essential than textbooks or desks – tools I happened to know were ubiquitous in the classrooms of rural Saskatchewan. Discoveries like this were paired with requirements that we use antiquated textbooks and lead culturally inappropriate social studies lessons and art projects during what was, no less, The Year of Truth and Reconciliation. Later we held Remembrance Day activities and events designed to maximize forgetting or just ensure no learning ever happened in the first place. My favourite experience was a requisite Emily Carr unit. The art unit proceeded with neither discussion of the woman, her works, or why we care about either, nor did it involve students in any painting; instead, kids took a one-off stab at copying a chosen Carr image with pastels (without teaching them how to use pastels, of course) and onto a giant sheet of orange construction paper. I struggled to understand how any of what we were doing fit with the basic teaching ethics we were required to demonstrate an understanding of before arriving on practicum, never mind any of the research or best-practices we had studied and composed papers on. Again, just as in my childhood school experience so many years ago, as in our Education courses, I didn’t know what I was doing here, what I was being asked to do, or why. The experience I was having felt not like cognitive dissonance so much as emotional and intellectual disintegration.

In dialogue about these run-ins with reality, the cohort and I were assured that those best-practices, and even the most tepid innovations, were not what parents, school districts, or veteran teachers (all of those we needed to engage with, support and be supported by, and eventually impress) wanted or were even prepared to temporarily endure. With this, I was convinced that not only had the education (r)evolution not arrived and was not anywhere on the horizon, but that continuing down this path would do little more than set me up for an endless series of personal, interpersonal, and institutional conflicts. So, I walked away; but not before writing my final paper on what I saw as a remedy to all of this: transdisciplinary curricular integration and Indigenization.

Reflections on Education

Themes of education, integration, family, place, and history were recurring throughout my time in Teacher Education and eventually converged in my major paper. My pre-practicum and in vivo practicum notes observed that the kids I was spending time with seemed isolated and isolating in their thinking and actions. Reflecting on this further, I reasoned that this made a whole lot of sense. In the style of an ethnographer, I attempted to immerse myself in and interpret the schooling I witnessed. Approaching it as an outsider, taking nothing at or about school as self-evident or unquestionable, immediately opened the whole activity and its participants to inquiry and my seeing it all in what felt like a clearer light. Though nothing novel or truly hidden was uncovered, coming at things this way, as exploration and discovery with an imperative to describe the experience, both confirmed and disrupted beliefs I had about our school system and the society we collectively cultivate through education.

I wrote about how just the setting and structure of school felt impossibly fragmented, and by design, all while we teachers like to suggest schools are the integrative nexus of every community. I questioned the land schools occupy and the arrangement of fields, play structures, and buildings, as well as who may attend, under what circumstances, and what time of day and year the school and its services are available. And I suggested that all of this makes things feel less open and holistic than presented. I wrote about how not only are people of different ages segregated into classes but they are persuaded that this is a meaningful and essential distinction.[10] As if that wasn't enough, I noticed how once in their assigned “division” we establish the separation and private property of the desk and its contents.[11] Along with that, I noticed how even the teacher is segmented away and placed at his very own and very different desk, apparently to accentuate the already perfectly blatant difference. I noted that we demand further disconnect by ensuring a student to teacher ratio of 25 or even 35 to one. Most critically, I pointed out (perhaps only to myself) how all of this is just the terribly fragmented setting we establish: the substrate of subtle and unofficial education out of which is cultivated all overt and official forms. And I speculated that we could surely imagine something different.

I was then drawn to the disintegration of subjects and lessons, how even a lesson itself (segregated from all others into one subject and fragmented off again into its own isolated part) is commonly composed or offered to focus on a single “prescribed learning outcome” (pretending, of course, that reading, writing, speaking, listening, or numeracy could ever be made so discrete.) And then I noted how these lessons were delivered in impressively rigid forty-five-minute segments, as if someone determined this was optimal for learning and had passed a law. From this insider/outsider vantage, I wondered how students (myself included, both historically and at the time of writing) could possibly resist all this subtle and overt oversimplification and atomization. I really wanted to emphasize that, more than any other skill, these easy and seemingly essential separations and impressive uber-simplifications amount to the critical education we deliver; how, in just this way, both passively and actively students are (en)trained to partition everything into as many little parts as they possibly can.[12] Students are led to believe this impossible and paralyzing fragmentation and alienation is how people and the world actually work. From my perspective it appeared that teachers, parents, communities, and provincial governments co-authored policy demanding students endure wave after wave of physical and conceptual disintegration and then, most cruelly and bizarrely, require these same kids to spontaneously transmute all this foundational learning into its antithesis: the ability to make connections, collaborate, and think from others’ perspectives. Though I didn’t think anyone specific was to blame for any of the above, I felt certain that all of us were responsible and that doing things differently was likely easier and less painful than staying the course. Most weirdly, I felt like we were all in agreement, in principle. Afterall, we, a group of 300 aspiring teachers and the entire Education faculty, were oriented to the program on our introductory afternoon by watching the very Ken Robinson TED Talk that drove me to enlist. So, I could not imagine being entirely alone in my assessment, but I also came across no practitioners making these or similar noises in practice.

Recess

Post Education, I left town once more. I moved out to Ontario and took up a job at a bookstore for a few years. I did so while volunteering as a tutor and mentor for high school kids at an amazing community health centre, one that saw education, mentorship, and much more as integrated aspects of their holistic wellness mandate. As with other moving around I did previously, living and travelling around the Great Lakes improved my understanding of Canada and Canadians as well as highlighting for me once again how at home I am on the mild, moist coast and in the mossy forests that cling to it. From Ontario I made my way west to Alberta. I made a connection while catching their folk festival the previous summer with a dear friend and offered to help a neat gaggle of rabblerousers trying to start a worker-owned co-operative bakery. Aside from the hugely informative exercise of attempting to start not only a functional co-op but also a business, more major life events unfolded while stationed on the prairies.

I was summoned home to Vancouver just after arriving in Calgary. My father went to the hospital after having a fall and they wanted him to stick around to monitor some things they felt were out of whack. By the time I arrived, the rest of my family was there as well. After a series of traumas and crazy interventions (some hospital-gifted pneumonia, collapsing a lung, uncontrollable bleeding, as well as dying momentarily and being brought back but with a bad heart arrythmia) with all his family present, he signed a do-not-resuscitate order. It seemed that in just a few days we went from “everything’s fine” to “I’m going to be in hospital for a week” to “I may be here a while” to “I guess this is it.” He requested to be moved to the hospice where my stepmother and her stepmother both had been. For me, the time between arriving home and his eventual death was somehow more grueling and intimate than I could have anticipated. By the end, it was a twisted mixture of terrible disaster and tremendous relief. And, despite all my unwilling expertise around death, the events that transpired over those two weeks overturned many of my feelings about death and dying. In proper contrarian fashion, I came to feel hospice care was an unfathomable cruelty and cancer the best possible way to go. (But these are essays of their own). As it turned out, spooning with one’s father on his deathbed can take one places one cannot imagine.

Returning to Alberta, I spent much of my time wondering what I was up to and why I’d ever left British Columbia. At the same time, my father’s death had me in more of a carpe diem frame of mind than usual and, prompted by a friend, I started corresponding with someone online. Despite months of conversation and both of us enjoying travel, with her in equatorial Africa and me in the Canadian prairies, it seemed unlikely we would meet in person. Of course, convincing myself of that meant that our meeting up occurred swiftly. Over Christmas, we both happened to be in California and so we just needed to visit. We ended up on a week-long adventure through some of the weirdest parts of California (the Salton Sea, Slab City, and the Anza-Borrego Desert), photographing all the birds, lichens, and mountains of crystallised fish skeletons we could find. It was a great first date. And in just a few months, I was applying for a tourist visa and getting all the exotic vaccinations needed to have a second date in East Africa. Three months in Uganda, Tanzania, and Zanzibar yielded a whole spectrum of new experiences I did not think I would ever have: from getting to meet many of the wildest bird species on the planet to spending time with a family of gorillas in the impenetrable mountain forests along the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and so much more. I also got to experience malaria, engage with some of the endemic police corruption, and escaped a kidnapping attempt by jumping from the back of a motorcycle. It was another full experience, one that had me just as much amazed and in love with the world as missing home.

Back to School

As soon as I returned to Canada, I made plans to head back to the Pacific. Having entertained more schooling for some time and tossed around many different options, I began searching for a good fit. I eventually found what felt like a perfect fit: the Master of Arts in Environmental Education and Communication at Royal Roads University. Not only did the program description read as though it was written with me in mind, but Victoria also seemed like the perfect place to do such a degree and the timing felt ideal, too. Before I knew it, I had applied to the program and was accepted. At the same time, Emily from Uganda was transitioning to a remote position at work and we were making plans for her to join me in Canada. Once more I was suddenly living another new life and was again head-down in required and recommended readings.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] Where the Wild Things Are (about a boy dressed as a wolf who is liberated by his imagination, and overcomes his anger, after his bedroom transforms into a jungle and he sails to a fantastical island where he goes on a romp with a band of terrible beasts) (Sendak, 1963); A Salmon for Simon (the story of a someone who worked all summer to catch a fish but when one is dropped in his lap, instead of eating her, he empathizes with the fish and labours all day to return her to the sea) (Waterton, 1972); Alice in Wonderland (the fantastical subterranean adventures of a girl who finds herself lost among an ecology of nonsensical people and other anthropomorphized beings) (Carroll, 1865); Charlotte’s Web (a story about innocence, change, and death that follows the tribulations of a spider, a pig, and a girl named Fern who is able to understand them) (White, 1952).

[2] Fred Penner’s Place (a show about someone who engages with frogs, insects, birds, and beavers as he sings and dances across beaches, over creeks, into the woods, then through a magical log and into an enchanted world full friends of familiar and alien species) (Roberts & Oswald, 1985-1997); Fraggle Rock (about an entire ecosystem of unseen creatures all going about their dramatic and mundane lives within the cavernous walls of one man’s house) (Henson, 1983-1987); The Dark Crystal (an epic story of cosmic tumult that takes place on a brilliant planet teeming with friendly and ferocious creatures all brought into harmony by the moral courage and personal sacrifice of a tiny forest creature and his more capable and tenacious female friend) (Henson & Oz, 1982); and Star Wars (a space opera set in a galaxy populated by innumerable exotic human, alien, and robot races, most notably a mysterious caste of warrior priests who employ combinations of non-attachment, meditation, dialogue, telekinesis, precognition, and/or laser swords to combat gangsterism and imperialism and restore balance to the universe) (Lucas, 1977).

[3] My parents explained this tradition as a concerted effort to expose us to as much as they possibly could and contribute to making us more cosmopolitan; but they also liked to note that it was cheaper and easier than keeping three kids entertained at home for two whole months.

[4] This says nothing of the sudden and deep distrust I developed for the state of modern medicine or how objectively terrible the culture seemed to be about communicating and dealing with any aspect of death (or, more commonly, just failing to address it entirely.)

[5] This seems like something that would be indelible but just to write these few preceding sentences I had to email my sister and check in about the timeline.

[6] Working with food in any fashion most definitely had none of the cachet it has at present. Cooking was about as sexy as working a toll booth or cleaning horse stalls, and the pay was commensurate. For me cooking was not a choice but something I ended up doing because my work experience was invalidated, as I was told, by legislation requiring community centres to hire only current students for their day-camps and after-school programs.

[7] Even as a cook I tended to be pretty quiet except when there was a reason bring up the wild morphology and colouration found among common nudibranchs or to draw someone’s attention to the Cirque du Soleil-esque mating behaviour of leopard slugs. “The world is amazing!” I would insist.

[8] Most of this work I just dropped into by chance and was taken in for need of bodies. The digital work was different, though. Aside from having always been around computers and taught myself to read and write HTML in the early days of the internet I’d also been messing with photo and graphic software for fun for more than a decade. Both skills started out as play but proved to be highly employable; that is, before the emergence of Web 2.0 and tools that automated away much of the above for most people’s purposes.

[9] As expected from a school born on the West Coast in the ‘60s, our Maoist, Palestinian, and Feminist instructors mostly assigned essays on readings by all of the Freudian-, Marxist-, and Hegelian-inspired thinkers of the Frankfurt School, or those inspired by them, with a smattering of Chomsky, Foucault, and Gramsci.

[10] Within a school we like to formally call these classrooms “divisions,” and prefer to identify them by a number; and then those classes that combine different groups, like grades three and four, into one classroom we like to refer to as a “split class”. So, even when we take what are obvious combinations and similarities and then highlight arbitrary difference and enforce separation. These are strange phenomena even for someone brought up with them.

[11] The desk in this way almost perfectly mirrors so many of our closets or garages: overflowing with “needed” personal items that, whether taken out daily or just once annually (as in a protractor or calculator, automobile, or golf clubs), still manage to spend almost their entire existence not being used.

[12] There are many examples of oversimplification, but a key one at the time was how the new elementary curriculum being proposed had as a key science concept “the five senses.” Of course, there can’t be only five senses. If we define senses as anything like “the physiological capacities informing our perception” then there are many more common experiences not captured in this curious little list. And, certainly, just about every five-year-old to have ever lived was aware of their sense of balance, experienced a pain, and knew when they had to use the washroom. So how do these primary sense experiences not make the list? And then isn’t their omission tantamount to insisting there are only four colours or that the base-ten number system tops out at 993? This is how it seemed to me.